The 1980's have hardly been an epic era of American liberalism. Reaganism and rightism have reigned supreme; Falwell and his ilk have damned all who hold the truths of Darwin to be self-evident, much less anyone who might have a word to say in favor of humanism. The decade in which greed has sometimes seemed synonymous with good has also witnessed the emergence of a new political breed—those intellectuals, largely centered in New York, for whom liberalism is a god that failed and conservatism the new dogma and deity. They are known as the neoconservatives, and their views have been much on parade recently in American periodicals. Yet, as Sanford Pinsker notes of the neoconservatives, whatever their politics, whatever their philosophy, whatever their power, there is no question about their favorite sport: the name of the game is liberal-bashing. Or, as Mr. Pinsker puts it, "the plain fact is that bashing the liberal is still what gets the creative juices flowing."
What got Mr. Pinsker's creative juices flowing was, he said recently, "anger, pure and simple." Noting that he has been "a non-political English professor for a very long time," he added, "If mad Ireland hurt Yeats into poetry, then mad Americas hurt me into polemical prose." For the past two decades Mr. Pinsker has been a member of the faculty of Franklin & Marshall College, where he is now a professor of English.
For Ernest Hemingway the great American novel was Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, the centennial of whose publication the nation celebrated two years ago. Still, even if the party is over, Huck Finn, in the words of Stephen Railton "remains an occasion to rise to. No American book poses a greater challenge to the adults, whether teachers or parents, who preside over our children's experience of it." As to the question of whether Huck Finn is racist, Mr. Railton has an ambivalent reply: "Yes and no; no and yes," But, he argues in his essay, "the reason to make it required reading is that it is the perfect occasion to confront the meaning and consequences of racism."
